Gather sufficient vinyl and also you’re assured to seek out your self with a few warped albums that gained’t play correctly. Possibly you foolishly left them in direct solar, possibly you didn’t retailer them flat, or presumably you discovered a wobbly previous rarity at a discount worth and figured you would restore it and beat Discogs at its personal sport.
{Photograph}: Chris Haslam
It is onerous sufficient to arrange a turntable or choose the fitting participant, however fixing a warped file with out specialised tooling (and the related data to go along with it) has lengthy been an excessive amount of of a ache to be price it for many.
Turntable stalwarts Professional-Ject is aiming to repair that. It has simply launched preorders for the Flatten It, its first devoted vinyl flattening machine. It’s a ruggedly good-looking lump of aluminum, with two 12-inch scorching plates that warmth and press your valuable lengthy gamers again into form. Can it save your worst data? In my expertise, it does fairly properly.
Lastly Flat
{Photograph}: Chris Haslam
There’s nothing particularly fancy right here, only a extremely correct thermostat providing the perfect heat to repair your shellacs. As soon as heated for round an hour, it should keep a temperature of 136.4 diploma Fahrenheit (58 Celsius) and gently iron out any vinyl warping. It would fluctuate simply two levels from this, and when you’ve left for 2 hours, right down to 86 levels Fahrenheit (30 levels Celsius), the file will be safely eliminated.
How lengthy you press a file for will rely upon the thickness of the vinyl. Chunky 180 gram pressings will take longer than the extra versatile, and tougher to warp, Dynaflex data. Earlier than I put the Flatten It to work on my cherished-but-wobbly assortment of warped ’90s white labels, I wanted to check it on one thing rather less valuable.
